The inability to quantify, demonstrate, and monitor information technology (IT) business value, or assess in a timely, reliable, and efficient manner exposure of an enterprise's business processes to risk and loss, consistently ranks among the top complaints expressed by corporate officers and business enterprise managers. To improve the efficiency of business process execution in support of corporate goals and objectives, business executives partner with IT specialists to develop custom applications, or customize commercially-available, off-the-shelf, packaged applications. However, in spite of these attempts, questions linger over whether these applications deliver the expected process benefits, whether they work as expected, or whether they create unexpected process risks.
Current techniques for measuring and monitoring factors that impact business value and risk exposure generally fall into three categories: (1) Conducting manual surveys, audits, and polls about whether the application or process in question is delivering the expected value and is sufficiently immune to risk; (2) Enhancing and changing the enterprise software application to be monitored to produce log files that contain evidence of whether the application or process in question is delivering the expected value or has been exposed to risk through negligence or abuse; and (3) Applying business intelligence or rules-based technologies to existing log files to discover whether the application or process in question is delivering the expected value or being compromised by exposure to risk.
The current techniques to measure and monitor business value and risk exposure are manual, imprecise, or homegrown ad-hoc measurement techniques that can be expensive, time consuming, unreliable, and inefficient, involving nontrivial overhead, and often resulting in significant costs and losses for the business enterprise.